This project attempts to break down categorization and systems of thought based
on opposing qualities. Instead, disparate elements are considered to work together to
increase their individual properties by creating a new property - a condition comprised
of the individual elments yet also surpassing them.
The word "hybrid" is appropriated to describe the nature of this investigation - the
renovation of a turn-of-the-century warehouse building into a multi-use building. The
project attempts to describe how a building that contains a range of disparate programmatic
elements can go beyond each element's exclusivity to produce a condition
in which the resultant is greater than the sum of the individual parts. The project looks
at breaking down specific delimitors of adjacent programmatic elements and promotes
cross-fertilization between them with the intended result of blurring the seams that
separate one from the other. The intent is to investigate, through a series of minimal
moves dictated by the conditions of the site and program, whether a condition of richer
and more varied experience can be achieved and, as a result, provide a start for defining
a condition of architectural hybridity.
Due to the size of the building that is investigated, this project focuses on two
areas of the building, the insertion of a courtyard and the insertion of a fissure, or
crack. The point of these investigations is to provide a tactical solution for the specificities
of this particular site while at the same time implying a larger, global strategy that
not only infers the remainder of this building but includes similar building types in other
locations.